


final resting place

by wastrelwoods



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Meet-Cute, Vignette, drama and tension, murderous mask AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-25
Updated: 2017-04-07
Packaged: 2018-09-26 21:30:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9922889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wastrelwoods/pseuds/wastrelwoods
Summary: While escaping the high-security mansion of a family of Martian reality television stars he's just completely failed to rob, Peter Nureyev has a chance encounter with a man left for dead.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i feel so weird writing fic in first person? but somehow with penumbra it works just as well

I should have the mask in my hands by now. I should be blocks away, vanishing into the ether with my prize, the whole house none the wiser. Instead I’m stuck watching from a distance, my spine arched at an unnatural angle between the shelves, witnessing a tableau that could only come from the galaxy’s most televised family. Croesus is red in the face, gesticulating wildly while the girl screams, hot tears pouring down her meticulously made-up face. 

There are no cameras here to see them, but their every action is a performance nonetheless. They’re totally absorbed, playing to an invisible audience. I could slip right past them. Then the father takes a step forward, and the daughter flinches, and pushes him. He falls back into the glass display case, and the half-cut circle shatters. Both the Kanagawa girl and I stand transfixed while Croesus’ head snaps through the hole in the glass, and the back of his skull meets the mask inside. 

There’s a wholly unpleasant thud as the polymer snaps shut over a face it was never molded to fit, and then a long, awful silence. 

Then the sirens start to blare. 

The girl jumps, and so do I, both of us suddenly faced with the consequences of our deeds. Only one of us is right, of course. It was my butchered theft that triggered the alarm, and not her accidental murder. But that doesn’t matter now. If I’m caught here, I won’t be the man who tried to rob Croesus Kanagawa. I’ll be the man who killed him. 

I run. 

Kanagawa Manor is a thief’s worst nightmare at the best of times. All those cameras blinking on and off without warning, a full tech crew skulking out of sight twenty-four seven. Not to mention all the hired muscle. But if you walk with purpose and a camera around your neck, you could find your way into nearly any part of the house without question. Now that the security has been triggered, I can’t even rely on that. Doors that had been unlocked require three passwords and a thumbprint to bypass, and I could swear some doors are even appearing from nowhere, blocking off passage after passage as I scramble to find an exit. 

But I know the first rule of thieving; that a door is only a suggestion. And while I may not be able to leave, a house this size holds a thousand different places to hide. And the ductwork is quite well-made. Almost comfortable, really. 

I’m quite determined to remain comfortably in the vents for the duration when I become aware of a gentle humming noise, growing slowly more audible. “Damn,” I mutter to myself, digging through my back pocket until my fingers close over the industrial-grade plasma cutter I keep for emergencies. Out of the corner of one eye I can see the red sweep of an infrared scan moving along the passageway, in my direction. I hold my breath and click the laser on, praying that the room below me is a storage closet, or at least unoccupied. If worst comes to worst I suppose I can fight my way out, but I prefer to have the odds on my side when I pick fights.

It’s only a short drop to the floor, but I land in pitch darkness. It’s silent in the room, though I can tell from the stifled, tepid air it must be quite a small space. As my eyes adjust I can spy the faint blue glow of a single camera, blinking off and on. It’s built into the juncture of the ceiling and the wall to my right, and pointing at the wall directly across from it. 

One thing is certain, this isn’t a storage closet. The dimensions are strange, long one way and short the other, like a crawl space, or a hidden room between two walls. I don’t disable the camera, but I clip a small device to the back to keep the feed looping, then dig back through my pockets for a pen light. A hidden room in a house like the Kanagawas could mean anything, but whatever they had to hide would almost certainly be both valuable and extremely illicit. Cyralic ale, maybe, or contraband weapons, or perhaps something else taken from the Ancient Martian dig site, if I’m very lucky, or--

Or nothing. I blink in the brightness of the penlight, shielding my eyes, but as my gaze roams over the chamber from side to side I see only unfinished, blank wall, with a steel door in the wall opposite me. I take a step closer, and trip over something at ankle height. I throw up an arm to brace myself on the wall, but in the half-light the angle’s all wrong, and I pitch over. 

I catch my weight on my hands. The penlight rolls across the floor. And behind me, someone groans. 

Slowly, I reach for my plasma cutter again, but the dark shape only shifts back against the wall with a rattle of chains. The penlight beam illuminates a pair of dark, glassy eyes, the glint of an earring, the shallow but rapid rise-and-fall of a chest. The head lists to one side, eyes tracking me up and down, a little unfocused, before cracked, bloodied lips split open in a grin. “I gotta say, you’re not the hallucination I was expecting to have.” 

Whoever this man is, he looks more like a prisoner than a guard. My defenses lower a little, but I’m still on edge. For one thing, even through the walls the muted buzz of the alarm system is an audible reminder of how close I am to capture. And for another, I know he can’t be a prisoner no matter how much he looks like one, because the Kanagawas official detainment unit is in a basement four stories below us. “Hallucination?” I ask, slipping the knife back into my pocket and reaching for the penlight. 

His wrists are cuffed together, with a short chain fastening them to the floor--presumably, it’s what I tripped over a moment ago. He lifts the whole ensemble to gesture to the wall directly below the looping camera. “Been staring at that clock for days,” he croaks, and when I stand and shift closer I can see the numbers flickering and shifting, counting slowly up. It’s counting by the hour, and the number is disconcertingly high, though I don’t know quite what it means. “I think by now I’d dream up anyone just for something new to look at. What are you supposed to be, some kind of guardian angel?”

I spin around at that to face him again, see him staring up at me with a kind of bleak wonder in his glassy eyes. His grin is wide and a little shaky, and I wonder whether he would look beautiful, if he weren’t so gaunt. “I--” I stop. Compose myself. Play into the fiction, until I have all the details. If he doesn’t know I’m here, neither do the Kanagawas. “I suppose I am whatever you want me to be.” 

The prisoner makes a low, raspy choking noise that I recognize after a moment as laughter, and his grin turns delighted. “Well, if I get three wishes….” 

I take a seat against the wall opposite him, under the camera and the clock. I will my heart to stop racing. “Try me,” I suggest. 

“Wouldn’t happen to have a double scotch on you anywhere, would you?” He’s still smiling now, like he’s laughing at his own joke. “Haven’t had a drop to drink in three days, I’m parched.”

That would certainly explain the difficulty he’s having in keeping his head up. I glance back at the clock, which confirms his answer, and immediately begin rifling through my pockets. It only takes half a minute to locate my emergency supply. A lucky chance that I had planned to board the next flight out of the city with Miasma’s mask in tow, and packed accordingly. “I don’t suppose plain water would suffice?” I offer, holding out the bottle. 

The smile falls from his face in an instant, and with a visible effort he focuses his gaze clearly on my face, brow furrowed. He doesn’t flinch away when I shift closer, uncap the bottle, and help to support his lolling head while he drinks. But his eyes don’t leave me the entire time. When I pull away to let him breathe, a little trail of the water dripping down his chin, he grunts, “You’re real.” It sounds like an accusation. 

I purse my lips, but there’s no avoiding it now. “Quite real, I'm afraid."

“You’re no Kanagawa,” he says dismissively, like someone who knows firsthand, and I have to steady my grip on the water bottle before I can offer him another sip. After this one, he coughs and pulls away. “Are you camera crew? Makeup? Prepping me for my close-up?” 

I’ve done enough research into the Kanagawa streams that I recognize the meaning behind this parlance. The ritual execution programs were one of their most popular series last year. “You’re already on camera, aren’t you?” 

He’s hunched back, as far away from me as the chains will allow, his chest rising and falling rapidly, glancing between me and the camera on the far wall. “You’re not supposed to be here,” he says, and I can see the rising certainty dawn on his face. Falling back on my heels, I allow my hand to slide slowly towards the pocket that holds my plasma knife. “How did you even get in? There’s no door.”

“There’s a door right there.” I tilt my head towards it. 

But he only shakes his head. “It’s welded shut. I _watched_ them do it.” He darts forward to grab my penlight from the floor with shaking fingers, points the beam up towards the hole in the ceiling, and cackles. “You’re _hiding_ ,” he accuses. 

I stare at him in wonder, more dead than alive and still piecing the clues together like it’s his job. “Who are you?” 

He’s trembling with overexertion, propped up by the wall and sheer force of will, glaring at me with hollow, dark eyes from the center of his sunken face. “The name’s Juno Steel,” he grunts, “And you’re trespassing in my goddamn tomb.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> does this advance the plot? not really, no  
> does it include another heaping spoonful of that good good hurt/comfort? you bet your sweet ass it does

The clock illuminated on the wall ticks over another hour. I pace the little room from side to side a dozen times over, thinking and planning and trying to ignore the way Juno Steel’s glazed eyes bore into me. He’s slumped over, manacled hands resting on his knees, head propped up by the wall, glaring. Silent. I try not to acknowledge him directly, taking time to adjust the device clipped to the back of the camera, poking my head through the ceiling to scope out the ductwork. It’s very quiet, now the alarms have stopped. 

I ought to be on my way.

In the corner of my vision, I see Juno’s eyes begin to flutter shut. I grit my teeth and kneel beside him again, uncapping the water bottle. In a few minutes the rest of my supply is gone. Juno doesn’t struggle--probably too weak by now--but neither does he continue to glare. While my palm is still cupped against the side of his face, testing the clamminess of his ashy skin, he sighs a little shakily. “What the hell are you doing?” 

I rest the back of my hand against his forehead, a little concerned at the heat of the skin there, and start to dig through my pockets for appropriately bland food. “I had thought that would be rather obvious, Juno.”

“Alright, I know what you’re doing,” he grumbles. “Just don’t understand why.”

As I unwrap a little packet of crackers I seem to recall pilfering from a cafe back in Olympus Mons, I consider his question. On the one hand, I’m not heartless. Most of the time I work in my own self-interest, of course, but no man is an island. Empathy is a powerful drive, and an essential part of the human condition. Still, calling that the whole picture would be dishonest, and I like to think I can be an honest thief. “You seem very well acquainted with the Kanagawas,” I say, in a tone that could imply I’ve changed the subject. 

“Friend of the family,” Juno clarifies, staring for a moment at the cracker I’ve placed in his hand and then stooping to sink his teeth into it with a surprising vigor. “Well, I was.” 

I hand him another, cautioning, “Slowly.” He snorts, but this time at least chews before he swallows. It’s been a very long time since I’ve allowed myself to remember what starving feels like, but the memories are still there, buried however deeply. I don’t begrudge him his eagerness. “And how does one become a family friend, exactly?” 

“Took a job I really shouldn’t have,” he offers by way of explanation. I see him eyeing the crackers, so I hand him the packet, leaning back to listen. “Got one of theirs out of a sticky situation, mostly in one piece. Cecil.”

I know the name, and the face. His streams are best known on Mars, of course, but both the perfume line and the designer shoes are popular throughout the whole quadrant. “I suppose that’s how he lost the arm,” I venture. 

“Yeah, Cecil’s got a real flair for drama. It tends to get him into trouble.” 

I watch him out of the corner of one eye. “And what did you have to do to make an enemy of the Kanagawas?” 

Juno Steel grins again, bitter and crooked. “Took another job I really shouldn’t have. Ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Violated my contract, apparently.” He’s still wolfing down the crackers. I pry the packet away from him after a moment, not eager to see him throw it all up again. 

“Slowly, I said--”

“Damnit, what the hell do you want from me?” he snaps, rattling the chain between his hands. “Who are you? Don’t I get any answers, here?”

I wrap my hands around his wrists and lean in, soothingly. “I want to help you, Juno. And I think you may be able to help me, too.” He watches me intently for a long minute, searching my face, which I’ve schooled into a practiced expression of pleasant harmlessness. What I want him to see is exactly that, a sympathetic man looking for a partner, offering an opportunity. The way he leans in closer, lips parted, tells me that Juno Steel is looking for a different kind of offer, and so my persona shifts. Flirtation has always been one of my favorite games to play. “We’d make a good team, you and I, don’t you think?” 

Juno looks positively starstruck, and then he blinks, and doubles over laughing, that same hacking, shuddering laughter from before. I watch in honest confusion, pulling away, and he fixes that sharp gaze on me again. “You’re good, you know,” he gasps. “For a moment there, you really had me fooled.” He slumps back against the wall, batting his eyelashes in an exaggerated mime. “Please, Juno, won’t you help me rob the Kanagawas blind? I _need_ you, you big, strong smart Detective, it’s like fate brought us together,” he says, mocking, and then drops the pantomime. “Well, you’re much prettier than Croesus, but I’ll tell you the same thing I told him: Thanks but no thanks. I’d rather die with my dignity intact.” 

The word _detective_ flits through my brain, and quick as lightning I have a new plan. “Croesus Kanagawa is dead,” I tell him, in a voice that betrays no further information. “Murdered.” 

He’s been watching me like a hawk, but now his unfocused gaze slides to the wall behind me, face blank and brows drawn slightly together. After a quiet moment Juno Steel shifts, and holds out his chained hands to me, palms turned upwards. “Get me the hell out of these cuffs,” he says. 

I smile, and oblige him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i still don't know where i'm going with this i'm just playing it by ear lol. lemme know if you have any suggestions here or @wastrelwoods on tumblr

**Author's Note:**

> hang out with me on the tumblr dot com im @wastrelwoods


End file.
